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We speedily prepared for a gale, as night was coming on, and no indications of the wind going down. The "Pegasus" was still in company; and the two ships kept up a pretty lively conversation with each other during that night of fog, by means of that nautical toy, the steam whistle. Fast and furious they went at it, singing sweet lullabys to the slumbering tars of the watch below.
At night the sea breeze made the rooms which I occupied deliciously cool; and from the balcony I could watch the bay-swell breaking in slow, cold fire on the steps of the wharves a beautiful phosphorescence; and I could hear Oki mothers singing their babes to sleep with one of the oldest lullabys in the world: Nenneko, O-yama no Usagi. no ko, Naze mata O-mimi ga Nagai e yara?
They would have to ride out at full speed in the black night, over ground treacherous with prairie-dog holes, to head and turn the herd of frenzied cattle, and by riding around and around them many times get them at last into a circle and so hold them until they became quiet again. Often this was not until sunrise, even with the lullabys they sang "to put them to sleep."
They would not know but what their mother was there!" Oh, she had her program all prepared; one could see that. "And I would sing to them no! no!" with a quick gesture, "nothing from the stage; little songs and lullabys I have picked up traveling around, and," hesitating, "little things I have composed myself little things that I thought children would like to hear some day."
Tully or the half-breed girl, albeit the housekeeper sang to him the lullabys that mothers know while the Digger girl, improvising blank verse paeans of praise and prophecy, crooned them to her charge in the unmusical monotone of her tribal tongue.
Sometimes she wondered how the choir in the Presbyterian church had progressed since she, once the mezzo-soprano soloist, had resigned to sing lullabys to a nameless child, if Andrew Daney still walked on the tips of his shoes when he passed the collection-plate, and if the mortgage on the church had ever been paid. She rose wearily and entered the little house.
Her dying mother gave her another name lest the father should some time find her, and there in that great noisy city Miggie lived five or six long years, gradually forgetting everything in the past, everything but Marie's name and the airs her mother used to sing. Miggie had a taste for music, and she retained the plaintive strains sung to her as lullabys."
From this time a restful expression replaced the patient hopelessness her face had worn before, and in the lullabys she sang the listeners caught echoes of the cheerful voice they had never thought to hear again. Gay she was not, but serene.
The streets were deserted, and lights gleamed only in upper windows of apartments, where sick sufferers tossed, or tender mothers sang soft lullabys to restless babies crooning in their cribs.
Skinski arose from the sofa and greeted us with his most elaborate bow. Ma'moselle Dodo didn't Society very much. She sat in the middle of the room and sang soft lullabys to a hold-over. "Mr. Jefferson, my nephew," Skinski was saying, "insisted that we should hit the suburban trail and locate your shack. Here's a note from nephew Bunch for you."
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